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Huawei finds itself in the crosshairs of Western security agencies
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- xyzzy_plugh 8y agoMaybe? I accepted this nearly 10 years ago.
- jankeymeulen 8y agoPick your poison. As Snowden revealed, Cisco was/is regularly backdoored by US intelligence as well.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoTrue, but unless USA ordered Cisco to do that, it's a bit different. NSA will use whatever it can to spy on others, it's obvious
- tracker1 8y agoI just with that the NSA had policies to disclose backdoors to appropriate business entities 30 days after discovery/purchase. They could still use 0-days, but at least the window would be reduced so the stockpile isn't unleashed on the world at large being a much bigger risk to security.
- smsm42 8y ago30 days is useless. Intelligence operations take years to unfold. Banning NSA from using zero-days doesn't mean everybody else is banned from using zero-days, including PRC.
- tracker1 8y agoI didn't say they couldn't use them.. only that they should have to disclose them to the company(ies) responsible. If they get a zero-day for windows, they can use it all they want... but they should have to disclose it to MS after 30-60 days of knowledge. The NSA is as responsible for technology security in the US as much as spying operations. They need to find a balance to do both. If they responsibly disclose and that happens before other nation states discover and take advantage of zero-days it makes it much better for everyone.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- AimForTheBushes 8y agoI'll take the poison that has freedom of speech/religion/press please.
- IllogicalLogic 8y ago...and every American tech company is a US intelligence front. Who do you think the bigger spy is though, USA v China? Let's be honest.
- manicdee 8y agoUSA by far.
- draw_down 8y agoIt's somehow different when we do it, apparently.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoWho's not accepting it? If a country can use something to spy on others it will. No doubt in my mind that China controls them 100%, one way or another, so...
- lazyjones 8y agoI‘ll happily let China spy on me if it means I‘m not vulnerable to „five eyes“, the German BND and all the other illegal spying operations with larger impact on my daily life.
- save_ferris 8y agoInteresting. Why do you see European spying operations as more impactful to your daily life than Chinese?
- IllogicalLogic 8y agoChina doesn't go around the world arresting people who haven't even visited their country... in Assange's case on the other hand the US...
- DeonPenny 8y agoYeh but they have in Vietnam and other countries they sphere of influence is just small.
- IllogicalLogic 8y agoFraming it as "influence" is wrong imo. History points to the Chinese having less interest in this power than western countries. My understanding is that China has aided Vietnam in arresting criminals the Vietnamese government is after. Do you have an example of what you stated?
- T-A 8y agohttps://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-overseas-abductions-1454633130 https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-overseas-abductions-1454... https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/29/the-disappeared-china-renditions-kidnapping/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/29/the-disappeared-china-r...
- save_ferris 8y ago
- dang 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18884720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18884720 is about the latest story.
- devoply 8y agoYou can't trust American companies to not spy on you. You can't trust Chinese companies not to spy on you. They are both arms of the government and conduct continuous espionage. Maybe we should get Samsung in this game as a non-superpower third party, though they probably already in the NSA's pocket as you hear no complaints about them from the US. It's like who would you rather your secrets be stolen by? Americans or the Chinese?
- tracker1 8y agoI'd rather neither... however, I've not been arrested for reading/spreading articles about the Snowden documents or for making disparaging comments against the U.S. (I'm a resident and citizen). The difference being if you live in China and do these things you may never be seen again. I'm also against the whisle-blower persecutions that started under GWB and escalated under Obama.
- devoply 8y agoI live in neither country. It's obvious that it's better to be a US citizen rather than a Chinese citizen. However, China has little ability to affect lives of citizens of other countries... whereas the US has much more power to do so potentially based on evidence gathered through surveillance they can for instance extradite people to the US to face charges for crimes whereas China is incapable of doing such a thing to non-Chinese citizens. This is no a hypothetical thing, it has happened more than once.
- Barrin92 8y agoCalling it a front is somewhat uncalled for, given that it's actually one of the largest tech companies on the planet. Are they connected to the Chinese government and used to exercise geopolitical power? Sure but everyone could have told you that already, because that's how China openly operates. There is basically no distinction between government and multinationals. As far as the rest of the world cooperates with China's businesses I think everyone sees that facet as a trade-off for access to the largest market in the world. So I don't agree with the take at the end of the article that finding a Huawei spy in Poland would be surprising or catastrophic for China. Grave cuts to commercial ties to China would probably send the economy spiralling, so nobody's going to do it, it's just going to be a tug-of-war for a long time to come.
- AimForTheBushes 8y agoIt's a front because it claims that it isn't at the will of the PRC.
- DeonPenny 8y agoYeh but I don't think western countries have really been paying attention. It's obvious based on sentiment they thought wealth would change that.
- IllogicalLogic 8y agoChina has been a big focus for the western countries' ruling classes for atleast 200 years. I agree that the populace hasn't been paying attention though.
- Latteland 8y agothere's been no plan for 200 years to deal with china. that's like saying western countries have been paying attention to the catholic church for 1000+ years. There's no government plan towards china, everything has changed every 25 or 50 years. Many western governments hoped they magically democratize as they became wealthier, instead they went the other way.
- thesaint 8y agoYou don't say...
- thinkling 8y agoSlight tangent: my perception as a tech person but not a networking professional is that TP-Link became big in consumer network gear very suddenly. It made me wonder at the time if they got a leg up from the Chinese government, and now with these stories about Huawei I wonder if they're similarly entangled. How much of a white hat effort is there to check what servers these products connect to? Are there (volunteer?/open source?) efforts to watch for suspect behavior or do targeted disassembly of the firmware?
- partiallypro 8y agoI'll choose the US, which for all its faults has a much better human rights record than China. Political opponents aren't jailed, there are no reeducation camps for minority groups (like Muslims.) Business isn't done through constant bribing of officials (which is very popular in China.) Etc, etc. Were it not for trade empowering the Chinese political class, China would be a hermit state like North Korea.
- devoply 8y agoThe human rights records is a p/r gambit which is mostly bullshit. The US violates human rights of all sorts of people all over the world all of the time. They just treat their own citizens with a certain amount of courtesy. > there are no reeducation camps for minority groups (like Muslims.) No there are just bombings and complete destruction of various Muslim countries that don't go with the economic agenda of the US.
- IllogicalLogic 8y agoDidn't the US just finish murdering about 2+ million Arabs over the last decade or so, I bet the dead Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis would rather be in "history lesson camps" in China.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- IllogicalLogic 8y ago"Business isn't done through constant bribing of officials" Are we just going to ignore the quid pro quo that comes with lobbying/campaign contributions, etc... We've basically legalized bribery in the US in many ways and our definition of corruption is so narrow that most of the corruption taking place does not get flagged. In China OTOH, my understanding is that Xi will put you in jail for corruption (points to the 1000s of Chinese politicians in jail).
- dang 8y agoWould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We ban accounts that do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Brain_Thief 8y agoI wasn't previously aware of this website, but after reading the article and noticing its rather brash style I decided to take a look at the front page. Several headlines stand out to me, including "Wrinkled, white, and wrong — this is the face of the Democratic party", "Black lives matter, until they’re ended by black people", and "Project Fact: how scared should we really be of a no-deal Brexit?", as well as a few statements seemingly designed to emphasize the racial and social undertones of various national debates. An admittedly cursory skim of these articles leaves the impression that the site's theme is low-key outrage generation and the propagation of divisive talking points that tend in a somewhat novel rightward direction. Although I agree with the premise of the featured article, I have to wonder if this site's intent is actually aligned with the notion of a harmonic western social order incorporating political cooperation and tolerance for diversity of thought and belief, or if it is yet another low-key radicalization / division vector designed to appeal to those who are too intelligent, educated, naturally docile, or otherwise moderate to be swayed by the more extreme purveyors of discord such as Brietbart, etc. In other words, the site seems to be right on the edge of dog-whistling without actually going over that line, and my instinct is to not upvote articles sourced from it.
- cthalupa 8y agoI was curious of the same thing. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/american-spectator/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/american-spectator/ It appears that it is a publication that leans heavily to the right, though apparently their reporting is factual. I would take that to mean that while anything that is explicitly stated as fact is likely true, the takeaways and editorials on the course of action is going be quite biased. Skimming some of the other articles, they don't seem to be particular fans of Trump, with a couple of exceptions, so I'd guess they are probably of the Neoconservative Bush/Reagan bent rather than Trumpian.
- manicdee 8y agoRemember that bias is just as much about how they filter what facts to report as it is about how they distort the facts they do report. Just because what they report is factual, doesn't mean they're unbiased. A newspaper that reports every crime by black people while only reporting serious crimes by white people might be factual, but it displays clear bias. A newspaper that reports every truth told by President Trump (but conveniently neglects the lies, rants and tantrums) might be factual but it is clearly biased.
- peterkelly 8y agoMeanwhile in Australia, our government has recently passed a law [1] that very openly and explicitly makes companies legally obligated to add backdoors for the government to spy on whoever it likes, and imposes serious legal penalties on anyone who discloses these activities to their customers or the general public. I don't know how much of the Huawei article is propaganda and how much of it describes a genuine threat. But one thing is for certain, which is that governments in the west are not much better. This was clear five years ago from the Snowden revelations; our governments are just being a little more open about it now and forcing private industry into their surveillance regimes. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/7/18130806/australia-access-and-assistance-encryption-bill-2018-facebook-google-apple-respond https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/7/18130806/australia-access...
- elefanten 8y agoThis kind of argument always comes up in these threads, so I'm just going to cut to the chase with the response: "Alike in desire to surveil" is not "alike in values and behavior." Looking for the next poster to jump in and say something about "But are the values really that different?" or "But which are really the better values?"
- ttctciyf 8y agoBoingBoing has the skinny on author John Schindler[1] > John Schindler was a prof at the College; he slammed Snowden as a traitor and compared Greenwald to Hitler, and was generally dismissive about concerns about network surveillance; he also sent pictures of his dick to a woman who wasn't his wife. He also co-wrote the report that stated that Sadam Hussein had WMDs, and helped send America to war. That was a lot worse than dick pics. I mean, while I have no issue with Schindler's evident animus for the current US President, and while the Polish case may (or may not) establish Schindler's intended point, his credibility is IMO way insufficient to be trusted on stories like this. He's really best seen as part of a fringe movement of pro-intelligence online cheerleaders and would-be vigilantes, whose most visible participant is the infamous Louise Mensch[2] 1: https://boingboing.net/2014/08/12/former-nsa-spook-resigns-from.html https://boingboing.net/2014/08/12/former-nsa-spook-resigns-f... 2: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/06/louise-mensch-and-the-rise-of-the-liberal-conspiracy-theorist.html?via=gdpr-consent https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/06/louise-mensch-an...
- twblalock 8y agoYou just posted a lot of ad hominems that have no bearing on whether the author's statements in this article are true.
- ttctciyf 8y ago>> He also co-wrote the report that stated that Sadam Hussein had WMDs, and helped send America to war. It's not an ad-hominem to suggest that an author's previous record on accuracy can be a guide to his present credibility.
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- chasd00 8y agoChina's spying, IP theft, and other bad behavior is nothing new or secret. Someone got arrested in Poland, well that's what happens when you get caught. Why so much China whiteknighting here and in the other story?
- altmind 8y agoif you leave all the colloquialisms, the article is based on two facts: * Last February, the heads of the ‘big three’ US intelligence agencies warned Americans against buying Huawei phones, which they deemed a security risk. * Poland ABW arrested the two on the spionage charges, huawei office is being searched i'm a bit disappointed, because there is nothing new in the article. i was expecting something intel about huawei devices being rigged with backdoors, calling home or having kill switches. *edit: grammar
- IllogicalLogic 8y agoWe need a smoking gun and less of the "Supermicro phantom chip" caliber reporting.